Welcome to my thoughts and feelings about the new Nikon flagship, the D3. As with all of my reviews this will not contain much technical jargon or specifications for the camera as they can be found elsewhere. Instead it will concentrate on how the camera actually performs in the field and whether it does what is says on the tin.
Specifically for this camera I will concentrate on exposure, autofocus, image quality, high ISO performance and some of the new features included on the D3. It will also be a review in two stages, a First Look which is the results of my first day with the camera and then a more in-depth look at everything after a few days of working with it.The D3 has promised much and is the DSLR which Nikon photographers have been waiting for with a full-frame sensor, fully customizable options and a brand new AF system. So let’s see how it measured up.
First LookNikon kindly sent me one of the new 70-200 f2.8G VR lenses to use with the D3 which is great except that this is a much shorter lens than I would use at this time of the year for wildlife. I know that Nikon Pro Services are particularly busy now and all longer lenses are out and about so will have to make do with this lens for now, Warehouse Express have supplied me with a 1.7x teleconverter to help a little.
Picture info – all the pictures shown here are displayed as shot from the D3 and no colour manipulation has taken place. The D3 was set to a Picture Control of neutral, lossless NEF, colour space Adobe 1998 and no sharpening has been applied anywhere. The images were all processed using Adobe Lightroom 1.3.1 and again no colour corrections have been made. I just needed to get that off my chest!My first shots with the D3 were taken this evening. I charged the battery, spent 30 minutes reading the manual and set it up for an autofocus test.
Not just any autofocus test but an extreme one....fast running dogs in very low light. And I mean fast dogs, my two are speed demons and we took them up to the local field at sunset. I set up the D3 to have Auto ISO to get a shutter speed of 1/2500th – this is a great new feature where the D3 will find the correct ISO value to give me the shutter speed that I want. I can see many situations where this will be very useful. In this situation it set the ISO at 1400, which is much higher than any Nikon photographer would have dared to go before!
